This is truly a ground-breaking application given that no others have come close to supporting this many languages. Other news apps are in the single digits for number of languages supported. And I haven’t been able to find any news application not supported by the native operating system. The only comparable content application I’ve found was The Bible, pointed out by my colleague Brian Williamson.

The most potentially exciting part of the app–if properly supported by the language services–is the ability for users to send photos, video, audio, text and video news updates from the field directly into our content management system for BBG web producers to use. I think of it as sort of a ‘Trojan Horse’ way to give our users, who are often in regions that are hostile to journalists and free press, tools to send us multimedia news information. It exponentially expands the potential of our news reporting operations.

Integrated proxy available on Android in the settings to circumvent Internet blocking

Apple AirPlay sharing support integration for IOS

These launches follow our applications already on the market from RFERL and Radio y TV Martí, which are built on the same framework and integrated into our content management system so that BBG web producers can easily and efficiently manage content across all platforms. RFERL was the pioneer in this work, building out the framework and CMS and we’re working with them to continue adding features and upgrading the experience and design in the future when we have all BBG entities on one platform.

This is just the beginning though. We have Alhurra on Android coming soon, as well as Radio Free Asia. …But the garden is never finished–we have many exciting upgrades coming soon, including more feature and streaming support, as well as a design refresh by the end of the year.